The tranquil, church-like atmosphere of the potting shed, stacked with freshly made boxes and a lot less dust – thanks to Raffe’s ‘extreme’ clean yesterday in pouring rain…

Before.

Outside. Guess what? Yes. It was raining again. Now, I consider myself (in general) an upbeat positive person. But on the fourth day of being soaked to the skin? Hmmmm.

Still , the colour in the garden always lifts the soul and, what I think is a totally fascinating, the birds began singing again. They have been more or less silent since July -except the hunting buzzards- and yet today they really struck up again. Benjy informs me that its a well known phenomena. The birds go quiet for a while after establishing their territory (deafening dawn chorus style) mating and raising their young. Then towards the beginning of September the robins are the first to start declaring their territory all over again.

Benjy also says that the reason we love birdsong is because humans have evolved alongside birds and that when they are singing – rather than an alarm call – it lulls the senses and makes us feel relaxed – an audible sign of no perceived threat.

I don’t know how true this is, but I definitely noticed the hearty singing, even in the heavy rain today.

Soon the borage will be coming to the end of their season. But they’ve done us proud. This punnet struck me as particularly pretty – a lot of the stars have a pink tinge.

In our service area by the polytunnels Raffe is busy washing and trimming vegetables from the garden…

I needed to keep the spirits up, so buried my head in the sunshine of these Jerusalem artichokes. Remember these? In winter we sent their rather ugly (but tasty) rhizomes to Novikov for cooking, now they are towering giants with edible flowers….

And as for these nasturtiums. Definitely back on the menu. Look at the intensity of colour!

Stunning.

With all the rain the slugs are definitely helping themselves again in their droves. And I’ve never seen so many frogs. They are everywhere which is a pleasure because I think they like to eat slugs. The BE slugs, however, are GIANT.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Pulling back the fleece on the baby leaf I came across this gate crasher and who can blame him? Slug heaven.

Kohl rabi and cabbage in thrilling violet shades…

Towards the end of the day we realised that loads more goodies were still coming out from the polytunnels, so it was all hands on deck with the mixes…

Smiles all round with this microherb Asian mix to be proud of! From left: Bob, Liam, Charlie and Guy.

Liam, as usual was a little over enthusiastic about getting the loaded boxes out through the door of the packing room…

And, the aftermath…

I suppose if I reflected on our 50th harvest and indeed the week that preceded it, I would liken it to a typical British festival without the music, alcohol or blankets. There was even a collapsing wall – due to rain – threatening to endanger all users of our incredibly authentic festival portaloo.